Posts Tagged David Allen

Dan Gold’s popular eBook “Evernote®: The unofficial eBook” is selling like hot cakes

Mouth-watering mini white chocolate cheesecakes! Yum

Mouth-watering mini white chocolate cheesecakes! Yum

Dan Gold’s e-book Evernote®: The unofficial eBook to capturing everything and getting things done! is selling like hot cakes.

"Evernote: How to capture everything and Get Things Done" by Dan Gold

"Evernote: How to capture everything and Get Things Done" by Dan Gold

It’s just $5, and it gives you a brief but useful guide to setting up Evernote to work as a Getting Things Done (GTD) tool, for both capturing ideas and “next-action” items, and for keeping track of projects and complete items, how to use tags and avoid over-tagging, tips on notebooks, etc., all with a GTD focus. Click the  link or the image on the left to read more about it.

Evernote Logo

I use Evernote, rather than OneNote. I tried OneNote for a while when my  Evernote account froze up, due to the dastardly reason that I was too cheap to cough up the 450 yen/month (4,000 yen/year) for the Premium account. I tried OneNote and I liked the pretty colours and tabs, but I missed the cloud functionality of Evernote. I use Evernote on both work and home desktops and on my iPad (and more recently on my iPhone, too), and all my notes are automatically updated in the cloud. I found OneNote less satisfactory in that regard, as I wrote in an earlier blog-post: “OneNote vs Evernote

OneNote logo

Dan Gold’s eBook is not an introduction to how to Evernote. For that, you need THE Evernote guide, Bret Kelly’s Evernote Essentials, 2nd edition.

Brett Kelly's Evernote Essentials. Click image to read more

Brett Kelly's Evernote Essentials. Click image to read more

And if you know little or nothing about GTD, Dan’s guide is probably not the best place to start. The best place would be THE SOURCE: David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity or website.

Brett Kelly’s guide can be used like a manual: read it through before you open the “box” and start using Evernote, or dipped into when you want to know something esoteric, like how to encrypt the text in a note.

If you have read Dave Allen’s book or are familiar with GTD and would like to know how 1 person (Dan Gold) has set up Evernote to work with GTD, then Dan’s eBook is for you. Dan is a very enthusiastic guy, and his positive feeling pervades his book. He writes simply and with humour.

And his eBook is selling very well. I want to promote books or products I use myself and made by people I respect. Click the image below to find out more about Brooks Duncan’s Paperless Document Organization Guide (for Mac- and Windows-users).

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» Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox :zenhabits

Leo Babauta has written several useful posts on GTD. This one is about getting email inbox to zero (Leo uses Gmail), and I’ve emphasised one section:

I have only one folder: Archive. When I respond to an email, or finish reading it if it doesn’t need response, or note it on my to-do list, I archive it. Simple as that. You could add a Read folder if you want. I usually print longer ones to read later, like during lunch or while waiting for something. Other people have an Action folder or a Waiting For folder, but I find that that’s just an additional inbox or “bucket” as GTD’s David Allen calls it that you have to constantly check. I don’t like to check extra folders. I have my to-do lists and my Waiting For list, and that’s good enough. So it’s as simple as pressing “Archive” on an email, and if I need to find it later, Gmail’s search is so good that it’s easy to find. I’ve never had any problems with this system.

via » Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox :zenhabits.

Braintoniq, creator of a set of instructional videos on using Evernote for GTD, uses 2 notebooks: Action Pending and Completed. Simple, but this only covers actionable items. Perhaps everything else (project support materials, etc.) is just tagged with no notebook, or does he not store non-GTD items in Evernote? Unthinkable!

I had a ton of notebooks which I’m now whittling down to just 3: ToDo, Reference (everything else non-actionable), and Inbox (unsorted). I use tags to assign  contexts and priorities to the ToDos. One of my ToDo’s is to sort through my 148 Inbox items 🙁

Gmail screenshot

Image via Wikipedia

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How to never forget the milk

 

Konan - the boy detective and his amazing glasses

Dan Gold recently posted a screencast about a cool tool called Followupthen, and I posted this comment:

Clear and concise screencast. Followupthen, I can see working for someone who spends most of their time working at their computer: they would most likely be at their computer when the email arrives, and (hopefully) will READ the email. Personally, I use my cell-phone calendar (not synced with Google calendar) to create reminders. I (usually) carry my cell-phone, and it buzzes to remind me to go to work (for example), or pick up my daughter from day-care.

After posting that, I started using my (non-Apple, non-google-synced) cell-phone’s “task” app. Why did I never use this before?!?!?

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